Cauldkeld

The wall at Cauldkeld had been rebuilt with the black faces turned in, and Corin saw that from two hundred yards up the hill, before he saw the woman standing at it.

He had walked down behind Orla all morning, off the shoulder of the ridge and down the north wall of the valley by a sheep track that had been a sheep track four years ago and was one again, and he had read the ground as he came, because his eyes did it whether he wanted them to or not. Two mules going up, a week since. A dog. A cart on the valley road that had not been there when the road was his. Peat cut on the moss above the head of the water, this spring, in neat rows, by somebody with a good spade and time. And the wall, running down from the house to the water where it had always run, a course higher than he had left it, and every stone that had been in the fire set with the burnt side to the field, so that from the track it was a grey wall and only from inside the yard would you see what had happened to it.

The woman at the wall did not move as they came down. She had a hand on the top course and a look on her that he knew from the far side of a ford, four years ago, at about the third hour after dawn, when he had come up at the sound and stood on the north bank and said nothing.

Orla stopped at the gate in the wall. The mules stopped behind her. He stopped behind the mules, where he had walked since Scarrow, and put his hands where they could be seen, and the woman looked past the surveyor and the two animals and the case on the inside, straight at him, and said, “You stood at the ford.”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t say anything.”

“No.”

She was forty-four, or near it, and had been a big woman and was a hard one now; the fat was gone off her and the frame had stayed. Grey in the hair, not much. Hands like Berta’s. She looked at him the way Orla looked at a bearing she had taken before and had not liked the first time, and then she looked away from him, as if that were the end of it, and it was, for now.

“Crown’s surveyor,” she said to Orla. It was not a question. She had seen the chain.

“Yes.”

“Which crown?”

“Ostmere.”

“Then you’ll draw us gone.”

“I draw what I see.”

Sela Brand looked at her for the length of a bearing. Then she looked at the valley, seven miles of it going east under a clear sky with the water down the middle and three roofs on it and the frame of a fourth, and back at the surveyor with the case on her hip.

“See, then,” she said, and opened the gate.

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He had not been asked in. He stood outside the wall with the mules while the two women went up the yard, and he did not look at the house, because he had last seen it as a shape of fire against the third day’s sky from the far end of the valley, and he found that his eyes would go anywhere but there. They went to the wall. They went to the burnt faces turned in. They went to the water.

She came back alone. She had a stone in her hands, a good stone, a face and a bed to it, the weight a woman carried in both arms and set down with her knees. She held it out to him across the wall.

He took it.

“Todholes,” Sela Brand said. “Two miles up from the Bridge, south bank, the wall that comes down to the water. Isbel and Davey Rook are putting it up and the valley takes turns. Stone’s where it fell. The Rooks weren’t there before, they’re from over the ridge, and they don’t know where the walls were.” She wiped her hands down her apron. “You can carry stone. You know where the walls were.”

He stood with the stone in his arms and looked at her.

There was nothing in her face to read. She was not asking him and she was not telling him; she had done the thing and gone back to her wall, and she was looking at the water. He had been stood down by a colonel once, and by a Chancellery clerk with a warrant, and by a lieutenant with a good hand, and none of them had done it like this.

“Yes,” he said.

“Then go and do it. She’ll be a week up here, chaining. I’ll feed her. I’ll not feed you, and I’ll not house you, and I’ll not stop you either.” She turned her head and looked at him once more, and it was the look from the ford. “There’s a stone at the ford with three names on it. You’ll not go near it. That’s all I’ll ask of you and I’ll not ask it twice.”

“No.”

He went. He walked down the valley road with a stone in his arms, past Blackshiel, where a man his father’s age stood in a doorway with a dog and did not speak, and past the water where it slowed, and did not look at the north bank at the fourth mile, and came to Todholes at the sixth hour with the stone against his chest and his hands gone white on it.

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Four days. He carried stone for four days, and nobody spoke to him except to say where the walls were, and he did not need telling.

The Rooks were young, and from Scarrow’s side of the ridge, and had come over in the spring with a cart and a promise of a place, and they were putting up a house on a footing they had cleared without knowing what it was. Davey Rook was a long lad with a burnt hand from something else, and he had heard, from Sela or from Berta or from the valley, and he did not say so, and did not say anything, and pointed. Here. The corner. That course. Isbel Rook did not come near him at all, and worked the far end of the wall, and he saw her watching his hands.

He carried. It was what there was to do. The stone lay where the walls had come down when the roof went in, a tumble, grassed over, and he pulled it out of the grass a piece at a time and took it to where it had been, because he knew where it had been. He had walked through this yard on the first morning with a torch. He had stood in the kitchen. He had looked at a fire laid in the hearth that nobody had lit, and told himself the map was right, and gone out, and given the order to the sergeant, and stood in the road while it caught.

On the second day he found the hearthstone.

It was face down in the grass under the tumble at the house end, a slab the length of his arm, and he knew it by the shape and the wear on the edge where a woman’s boot had rested for forty years, and he turned it over, and it was black on the face where the fire he had ordered had gone on burning after the roof came in on it. He got his hands under it. He carried it up the yard and set it in the house end where the floor was cleared, in the place, square to the gable, and stood back from it.

Davey Rook had stopped work at the far end.

“That’s the hearth,” the lad said.

“Yes.”

“How did you know where it went?”

Corin looked at the stone.

“I stood on it,” he said, and went back for the next.

His hands went on the first day. He had an officer’s hands and had known it, and by the second evening they were open across both palms and he wrapped them in a strip off his shirt and carried on, because the alternative was to stop, and the valley took turns, and a man who stopped was a man who had been given a turn and not taken it. On the third day old Halket came down from Blackshiel with the dog and stood at the wall and looked at the hands, and at the courses, and said, “The byre ran that way. To the burn. It was a good byre,” and went home.

“I was warned about the hands,” Corin said, to nobody, when Halket had gone. “I was told an officer’s hands would be no use to him the day he stopped giving orders. I thought it was a figure of speech.”

Davey Rook did not laugh. He had not been meant to.

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He saw her once a day, from a distance, and it was all he let himself have.

She was working down the valley from Cauldkeld, a station at a time, the way she had come along the ridge, and on the second day he saw, a long way up the water, a wink of brass on the end of Sela Brand’s wall, and knew what it was. On the third she was at Blackshiel, on the north bank, too far to see, and that night Davey Rook said Halket had come out and stood by her the whole station, and the dog had lain down. On the fourth she was at Crossgill, across the water from the ford, and he put down the stone he was carrying and stood in the Rooks’ yard with his back to the gable and watched her for the length of a station; the small figure, the legs, the straightening to write, the bend, the light going west behind her along the ridge.

She did not look down the valley. She had told him on the ridge what she was doing, and she was doing it. She was measuring the ground.

He picked up the stone.

The two mules were at Sela’s wall. He could see them from here, a long way up, two shapes at the top of the water where the old woman had put them in the infield, the dun one and the grey one, and it was the first thing in the Brack he had looked at and been able to go on looking at.

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On the fourth evening Sela Brand came down the valley road to Todholes on foot, with a covered dish, and gave it to Isbel Rook, and then came to the wall where he was setting the last course of the day and stood on the other side of it.

He set the stone. He put his wrapped hand flat on it, and breathed out, and it sat.

“They’ve a question for her,” Sela said.

He waited.

“Isbel. Annot Weir from Crossgill. Halket, though he’ll not say it himself, he’ll stand behind Annot and nod. They’ve watched her four days and they’ve watched her write our names, and Isbel’s been to me twice to ask what a map’s for, with our names on it, and I’ve told her wait. Wait till she’s seen the surveyor work. She’s seen her now.” Sela looked at the wall, at the course he had set, and at the burnt faces turned in, which he had done without being told because it was how Cauldkeld had been done. “They’ll ask her tomorrow. Up at mine. What it does.”

“And what’ll she say?”

“I don’t know.” Sela Brand looked at him then, and it was not the look from the ford; it was a different one, and he did not know it yet. “Nor does she. That’s why I told Isbel wait. There’s no good asking a thing of someone who’s made up her mind.”

The water went by. Two miles down, out of sight round the bend, the Bridge was where it had always been, and he had not looked that way in four days either.

“You’ll want to be there,” Sela said. “Near enough to hear it.” She turned to go back up the road. “And far enough not to answer for her. I’ve watched you four days too, Captain. I know what you’d do with a question that wasn’t yours.”

She went. He stood at the Rooks’ wall with his hands open under the cloth and looked up the valley toward the house he had not yet looked at, where a woman with a chain was going to be asked tomorrow what her map did, by people whose names were on it and in his coat; and he found that he did not know what she would say, and that he wanted, more than he had wanted to turn round at Scarrow, to hear it, and that he had no answer of his own to give her if she turned and looked for one.